INFORMATIVE PROGRAM

Archizoom's Internal Landscapes

Program initiates the projects beginning (in time) and initial identity (in character). However, there is a downside to the agency of program: it defines, but it also limits. This limitation is registered not only in the nominalism of the brief - house, museum, hospital - but also, with the very action, program implies to arrange, and at times, in excess. It alternates between an evocation of arrangement and a surplus of such arrangements 

John McMorrough, Praxis 8.

Paraphrasing Rafael Moneo, to define program is to define architecture. I would say that the difference between program and function lies in agency: a deeper project implied actively by the architect, instead of a series of accepted assumptions. The current logic of the program concerns the idea that anything can happen, and we can see projects that avoid a formal definition of acceptable functions become the holy grail of contemporary architecture (and Cedric Price its Indiana Jones). 

In my research, I propose another look at the concept of program, one that is limited by the spatial possibilities of type: there are no direct relationship between function and form, but the same cannot be said that any form could allow any function. The architect must create through a series of types, different conditions that absorb the multiplicity of possible programs, and then operate within the realm of the possible, yet, unexpected. By that, I mean that it is still possible to skydive in an elevator shaft, as long as the shaft becomes a long, vertical rectangular space spanning multiple floors. To re-enact the classification system - bringing Borges’ again to discussion - opens up possibilities to really free the relationships between form and possible function, and the deconstruction of the naming system is the first step to the rebuilding of this relations. Understanding the formal possibilities of the typologies, we can open up an array of possible uses, and by specifically controlling and designing these conditions, I suggest that we can avoid creating big-sheds of mono functional universal space but definite arrangements of possibilites. Less Pompidous and more Seattles. 

My project sets out to create a set of controlled relationships between different types of spaces, that in turn allow positive interrelations between possible programs to be occupied with. Usually, a system like this fail in understand the question of scale, ending in a conflict with spatial and environmental qualities desired. Here I propose the concept developed by Cecil Balmond in his book Informal. The conditions of local, juxtaposition and hybridization are to be applied on different scales, with focus on a non-linear system of adjacencies, with each object (or space, function) is specifically controlled on a local level, while when combined with another object by a close adjacency, implies the effects of juxtaposition, when each one influences the other. If this influence becomes not only of proximity, but reaches a critical-mass that interferes with the deeper structure of the object, it becomes hard to separate what is one or the other, and a new condition is created, one of hybridity and unexpectedness. This condition, I would argue, is what drives vitality, the unexpected and creativity in the cities we inhabit. 

The concept of the project is to, instead of liberating the program to allow it to be whatever it wants to be, create spatial possibilites that hybridize the architectural and urban space to let the program make its magic.